WHAAAAAAT???
get up? as in out of the wheelbarrow?
“…Can… I…?”
“Of course you can!” She’s laughing now. Thanks, me.
I consider how long I’ve been stuck here. And why I keep getting back in. I have been on this endless loop, a continual recycling back into this stupid tin can with a wheel. I’m convinced there’s a bungee cord sewn to my posterior that keeps snapping me back to the same place.
I have Stockholm Syndrome. Or at least something like it. I suffer from a terminal case of I’ll Give Up My Life Direction Because I’m Just Sure You’re My Soul Mate. HELP WANTED, seeking wheelbarrow-pusher. I listen to others around me, while neglecting the most important opinion about my life of all, MINE. But I don’t understand what went wrong this time, I was doing so well, doing all of these woman empowerment things, I just don’t get what went wrong.
“Come on!”
She’s apparently not going to allow me to just sit and contemplate why. She wants action.
I’m still entirely baffled as to who or what exactly this is. I know it’s me, but why the difference? I mean, where’s HER wheelbarrow? And her skin is goddamn glowing, not the rust and dirt I’m enveloped in at all. WHO IS THIS??
She reaches out her hand to me, and I touch it, feeling her warm, smooth grasp.
She’s pulling me out of the wheelbarrow.
But if I leave the wheelbarrow, what will become of me? How will I get anywhere? I have an unhealthy but steadfast relationship with this damned barrow. I know I need to leave, and yet can’t seem to do it. I’m attached, like the story of the morbidly obese lady whose skin became one with the very upholstery of her favorite couch, the comfortable security blanket of fabric destined to do her in. It literally killed her. Likewise, the wheelbarrow is familiar, my body knows just how to curl up against the bends of the oxidized metal. I have become comfortable in this surrounding, just like I did in the church, wearing an ill-fitting mantle that represents not at all what I want to be.
It’s occurring to me that in order to change, I’m going to have to become very, very uncomfortable.
What happens to people when they stay in a miserable job? Or in a miserable relationship? The door’s right there, but we are such Godforsaken creatures of habit that we tend to stay right on our one-way, dead-end road. Get up, pour coffee in the same room into the same cup from the same carafe, put on the same clothes from the same closet, eat the same breakfast sitting across the table from the same miserable fucker you sat across from yesterday.
Drive the same car behind the same dingdong staring at the phone in their lap going an infuriating 45 mph, get to work the same amount of early, on time, or late as always, clock in the same, unlock the door the same, turn on the laptop the same, then grunt away for eight or so hours running the same hamsterwheel…
Only to somehow get behind the same slow dimwit on the way home, same route, same road, same journey, same music, getting back to the same house on the same street with the same annoying neighbors to have the same dinner with that same fucker to watch the same Netflix binge or root for the same team yelling at the same TV before either lying next to the snoring fucker or, very commonly, sleeping in a different room than the fucker because you’re too damned stuck to change any of this bullshit!
Until you do.
And it turns out, it’s actually possible.
I look at the wheelbarrow one last time. It’s so familiar, I know every nook and cranny, every creak and moan of its moving parts. I whisper to it… goodbye wheelbarrow, grip tightly to what is weirdly my own hand, and step out.
My legs are cramped and sore, and at first my knees want to give out. “Come on, you can do this!”
I’m weirdly being cajoled by myself.
I set my second foot out, and hoist myself up. “There you go! Now straighten up.”
I hold myself up. “TALLER!”
Sheesh! I’m being rather intense.
But I do straighten up, and imitate her stance, tall, chin up, shoulders back. This feels better already.
“Let’s walk.”
And we head into the field in the direction from which she arrived. I turn back for one last glance, pleased to note that I do not turn into a salt pillar. I see the wheelbarrow, crusty and pathetic. How the hell did I even fit in there? And I startle with the awareness that I have already changed. Just in the act of exiting this godforsaken vehicle, I am now too big to get back in. I’m a bit panicked about this, but I can’t go back, I no longer fit its confines.
Okay, time to figure out what the hell is going on.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“I mean, I’m pretty sure you’re me…. but how? And why??”
I glance back, and now the wheelbarrow is just a speck in the distance.
She stops us a moment, turns to me and grasps my hands.
“Monica, I am the possible you. I can be the future you. You can choose me, or you can choose another version of me, but you need to know that this is what’s possible. I’ve come back to tell you… I am your future possibility.”
I am in awe. Wait, I can be…. this?? She’s a heroine, a goddess. The wind is still rippling her hair as her determined form fights the breeze, looking like the queen of the world for the way she stands straight and strong, superhero of the meadow.
“And to kick your ass for not doing the things you need to do to get here.”
I protest.
“I don’t get it. I quit dating. I’ve been knocking things off my bucket list right and left. I bought my dream car. I do all kinds of cool shit by myself. It’s not my fault I still wound up in the same place.”
“MONICA! Yes, lots of people use new experiences in an attempt to fix their lives. Jumping out of airplanes, ultra-marathons, cool trips. Nice experiences, but that’s not what’s going to create me.”
I’m getting annoyed with myself.
“I TRIED EVERYTHING”
“NO. You didn’t.”
“Okay, fine. What didn’t I try?”
“You are doing, not being.”
Please. Bullshit philosophical statement if I’ve ever heard one. Pretty sure I’ve read that statement verbatim in one too many pamphlets.
“excuse me?”
“All you’re doing is fun activities and buying some cool shit you didn’t have before. But who are you? What gets you out of bed each day? What are you actually creating with your life?”
I’m still stumped. And irritated.
‘You know what I’m going to ask.”
“‘What do you want?’” I ask, in an irritating singsongy neener-neener voice intended to irritate myself back.
She fails to get annoyed, which I find annoying.
“First of all, you’re still making decisions based on what others think. Let’s take something super basic. Your haircolor. What is your favorite?”
quietly… she knows my damn answer already “…blonde…”
“And yet everyone else likes it dark, so you haven’t even tried it.”
“Well that’s pretty minor…”
“The little things ARE the big things, Monica. you know this already! What happens in the small happens in the large. Why do you still care what anyone thinks about your decisions regarding your life?”
“AND, what are you doing with this life? Are you writing the book you wanted to write? How’s your business going? Are you doing all the music you want to do? Do you look how you want to look? Are you creating the life you wanted?”
“Staaaaahhhhp!” I complain, sulking at this rather pushy Monica. Never mind about the goddess, she’s kind of a bitch.
“You are missing the point. The reason you keep being hauled away is because you have not yet made your own construct so big that you’re immobile, your direction so strong that it can’t be moved. You need to become so solid in who you are and what your direction is that no one can convince you to take a different path. You see that gravel path?”
I look back once again, but it’s gone! It’s all gone. No gravel path, no wheelbarrow. I panic…
“W-where’s the path?”
“YOU DON’T NEED A FUCKING PATH!”
“W-well, how do I know where to-”
“YOU MAKE THE PATH! You are the pathmaker! You decide! But you can’t just do random fun things, you need to create a path for yourself. YOU get to decide who you want to be, YOU decide where you go, YOU become who you want to be! And once you decide, you have to create yourself so concrete that you barrel in the direction you have determined, unstoppable.”
And suddenly I get it. I look at Monica, my eyes blurring with the salt of tears, and she says softly “I am who you are going to become.”
I sense a shift, and I feel a path under my feet. I am standing upon a path of glittering gems, sparkling wildly in the afternoon sun, which is now present. (Hey, my vision, my choice. Think it’s cheesy? Create your own damn vision. Kind of the point, really.)
“I will see you again, sooner than you think.”
She steps toward me and hugs me, and then melds into me until she is gone inside of me, because she IS me, the possible me, the me I am going to create.
And now I see something in the distance, an incredible skyline that would put the Emerald City to shame. It shimmers in the distance, and I fully understand now, this is the life I am about to create.
I take off down the path, running for my life.
Worship Leader Gone Wild 